Marathon Digital Holdings has announced its agreement with Applied Digital to purchase a 200-megawatt (MW) Bitcoin mining facility in Texas for $87.3 million. The acquisition will be paid in cash from Marathon's holdings, finalizing once all price adjustments are settled.
This acquisition will increase Marathon's total Bitcoin mining capacity to approximately 1.1 gigawatts, nearly matching the 1.21 gigawatts needed to power the fictional "Flux Capacitor" from the Back to The Future films. Marathon's chairman and CEO, Fred Thiel, noted that the transaction would increase their operational control, reduce costs by around 20% at the site, and provide an additional 100MW of capacity for expansion.
Marathon Digital had a successful revenue year in 2023, with $387.5 million in revenue, up 229% from the previous year. This growth was attributed to the late 2023 Bitcoin rally and a 147% increase in Bitcoin production year-over-year.
In late February, Marathon introduced a new direct Bitcoin transaction submission service called "Slipstream," designed to facilitate and accelerate large or non-standard transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
As Marathon Digital looks to the future, it will need to navigate the upcoming Bitcoin halving, expected to occur in mid-April. This event will reduce block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block, potentially impacting large-scale mining operations like Marathon's.
